Readers often ask writers how it is that they write their stories – where do the ideas come from? From my imagination, the writer answers. Ah, yes, readers might say. But where is your imagination, and what is it made of, and has everyone got one?

Well, says the writer, it is in my head, of course, and it is made of pictures and words and memories and traces of other stories and words and fragments of things and melodies and thoughts and faces and monsters and shapes and words and movements and words and waves and arabesques and landscapes and words and perfumes and feelings and colours and rhymes and little clicks and whooshes and tastes and bursts of energy and riddles and breezes and words. And it is all swirling around in there and singing and kaleidoscoping and floating and sitting and thinking and scratching its head.

Of course everyone has an imagination: otherwise we wouldn’t be able to dream. Not everyone’s imagination has the same stuff in it, though. Cooks’ imaginations probably have mostly taste in them, and artists’ imaginations mostly colours and shapes. Writers’ imaginations, though, are mostly full of words.

And for readers of and listeners to stories, their imaginations run on words too. The writer’s imagination works and spins and shapes ideas and sounds and voices and characters and events into a story, and the story is made of nothing but words, battalions of squiggles marching across the pages. Then along comes a reader and the squiggles come to life. They stay on the page, they still look like battalions, but they are also romping about in the reader’s imagination, and the reader is now shaping and spinning the words so that the story runs now inside his or her head, as it once did in the head of the writer.

That is why the reader is just as important to the story as the writer. There is only one writer for each story, but there are hundreds or thousands or maybe even millions of readers, in the writer’s own language, or perhaps even translated into many languages. Without the writer the story would never be born; but without all the thousands of readers around the world, the story would not get to live all the lives it can live.

Every reader of a story has something in common with every other reader of that story. Separately, and yet in a way also together, they have re-created the writer’s story in their own imagination: an act that is both private and public, individual and communal, intimate and international. It may well be what humans do best.

Materials needed:
The 1952 musical film Hans Christian Andersen, posters for the event (designed by college students), and materials to design finger puppets for the story characters.

Brief outline of program or event:
Children’s literature students from Community colleges would read Thumbelina and use finger puppets to re-enact the story as portrayed in the 1952 movie with Danny Kaye:

A party theme with the sound/music playing I’m Hans Christian Anderson:

Celebrating ICBD can be as simple as making a display that catches the attention of parents and children browsing in your library. Robyn Green of the Salt Lake City Public Library created this display called “Global Connections.”

Utah USBBY Representative Lauren Aimonette Liang teaches an International Children’s Literature undergraduate class at the University of Utah. In that class, she revisited the authors each student had chosen to study for their Hans Christian Andersen Award author studies (done the previous month) by going around the room and stating the title and general plot of the favorite book they had read by the author they had studied.

It’s easy to celebrate International Children’s Book Day throughout the year by incorporating international children’s books in your storytimes, read alouds, and reader’s advisory, and by making displays like the one pictured here, courtesy of the Northport-East Northport Library.

Need international book suggestions? Check out the Resources page for the current Outstanding International Books list and the ALSC Quicklist inspired by 2013’s theme “Bookjoy Around the World.”

Doris Gebel is the President of USBBY and Head of Children’s Services at the Northport-East Northport Public Library in Northport, NY.

The International and Global Literature Collection at Northport Library was launched in December 2012. This growing collection features children’s and young adult literature translated from a language other than English, imported from outside the USA, or written by an author with international roots.

Perhaps the best known literature from abroad comes to us from England. What American child does not know Winnie-the-Pooh (albeit thanks to Mr. Disney).

Never the less, he is just one of the famous animal characters that populate British children’s literature. He stands proudly next to Paddington and the creatures of The Wind in the Willows. Little people are no strangers to British children’s literature beginning with the folk character of Tom Thumb to Jonathan Swift’s Lilliputians in Gulliver’s Travels to Norton’s Borrowers.

Children of long ago cherished books like A Child’s Garden of Verse, Gulliver’s Travels, Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island. From the more recent past there’s The Chronicles of Narnia, The Sword in the Stone, The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, Mary Poppins, The likes of Joan Aiken, Leon Garfield, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Mollie Hunter, Helen Cresswell, Ian Serrraillier, Philppa Pearce, William Mayne and Roald Dahl stand in the halls of great British writers for children. Contemporary authors such as Eva Ibbotson, Phillip Pullman, Hillary McKay….dare I mention J.K Rowling are also currently popular in England.

And this doesn’t touch on the great tradition of picture books. Just consider the works of the great nineteenth century illustrators, Randolph Caldecott, Kate Greenaway and Beatrix Potter, to name just three.

Books used:
The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Handa’s Surprise, Crow Boy, Each Kindness, Flat Stanley, Goodnight Moon, Chicken Soup with Rice, The House that Jack Built

Materials needed:
Video clips, pictures, PowerPoint presentation

Brief outline of program or event:
Present narrative and demonstrative materials on the establishment of libraries in public elementary schools, doing read alouds to elementary school students with extension activities, reading comprehension classes to older high school students and workshop on the magic and values of children’s literature.